


Fierce Midnights and Famishing Morrows

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Break Up, Guilt, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pining, Post-Break Up, Terrible Coping Mechanisms, body disposal, canonical suicide, sanity slippage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 18:01:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20728445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Dorian Gray was the worst thing to happen to Alan Campbell.





	Fierce Midnights and Famishing Morrows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chillydown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chillydown/gifts).

Dorian Gray left Alan Campbell with the taste of wine in his mouth and the scent of death on his hands. 

To say that Alan took the ultimate ending of their entanglement poorly would have been an understatement. After taking his leave of Dorian (and Alan thought, while leaving, _Mr. Gray now, he must be only Mr. Gray, if you must put a name to him at all) _he returned to his own dingy garrett and wept into a pillow gone gray with repeated washing in already-used water. The wind howled and rattled the window, pushing its probing fingers in through a crack in one of the lower panes of glass, and Alan watched his breath spiral frostily above him in the cold. 

The rented room, far worse than Alan could afford, even on his meager allowance, seemed suddenly stark and threatening. It had been a comfort, romantic, even, when Dorian was by his side, when Dorian occasionally graced his doorway. A bottle of imported wine, perhaps French, a daisy in a bottle on the sideboard, the disdainful curve of Dorian’s lip as he surveyed some new mouse-droppings in the corner; all of these things lent an air of belonging to the room. But Alan had chosen to excise the trappings of that past life from his present, as surely as he wielded the scalpel in his laboratory. He stood to gain anything and everything; only profit could come, after all, of breaking off his acquaintance with the notorious Dorian Gray. But his heart cried, loud and hungry, for everything he’d given away, for the golden shine of Dorian’s hair. 

Alan passed a tormented age learning to forget everything he’d learned at Dorian’s side. He wasn’t special. He wasn’t anything now, not really. He would become Dr. Campbell, upright, honorable, fastidious, and married to some bland, pretty girl from a bland, respectable family, and his past would melt away like a morning fog, only echoing when people wished to make him sound like some romantic mad scientist on account of his inventions. But like a London fog on a dark day, like the last, echoing notes of the violin, the past had a way of lingering in the cobwebbed corners of life. 

He’d given Dorian up, but he still couldn’t escape the stares on the street or the whispers in quiet hallways when he encountered acquaintances. Alan knew what they called Dorian. He knew what they called _him. _But he would bear it, without laudanum, without drink. Respect would be his opiate. 

But it was hard to respect yourself when you knew the ugliest depths of your own soul. And there were words to describe people like him, words like sordid and shameless. Alan tried to think about his mother’s face, smiling gently and proudly when he won his prizes in chemistry, in anatomy. He tried to forget Dorian’s. He tried to forget Dorian sleeping peacefully, his eyes closed and his hair like spun gold in the weak morning light. But he couldn’t. He woke up sweating and shamefully hard from dreams of Dorian, memories of the sounds Dorian drew from him and the sounds Dorian made in the heat of their lovemaking. And then he wept, half out of self-hatred and half out of longing for the life he wanted and that he had selflessly, stupidly given up out of a prudish desire to be respectable. 

And then, one night, Dorian summoned Alan. 

***

The body on the slab had already taken on the dull cast of death when Alan examined it, but the rot had not yet set in. It was the corpse of a man was older than he by some years, clearly, but he was not yet truly old. His face was calm in death, and Alan suspected it was calm in life as well, though he assumed that anyone so unfortunate as to be acquainted with Dorian Gray was plagued with inner torment. 

Alan had worked quickly, cleaned his tools quickly, finished as quickly as he could. And all the while he thought. Was this all he had ever been to Dorian? A convenient accomplice in the dirtier bits of life? A companion at the opera, an adoring retainer always ready to play a pretty tune on an accursed violin? Another young man to corrupt? 

He did not realize he was crying until the tears had already dried on his cheeks. Alan looked about as he tidied the small room. It was full of dust, a long curtain hanging at its back wall. He went over to it. Perhaps there was a window he could open to let out the fumes. They were making him light-headed and queasy, and doubtless they were spreading to the rest of the house. Perhaps they were corrosive to things besides bodies, and if Alan knew one thing, he knew that Dorian hated the thought of anything harming his precious collections. 

Alan pulled the curtain aside, but there was no window behind it. Instead, there was a painting, shadowed by the drapes of cloth, hanging in a heavy, gorgeous frame. He peered at it, and then stepped back in horror. It was a grotesque, leering from the canvas with cruel, gleaming eyes and knotted hands clasped over an emaciated chest. Though it posed seductively, its gaunt and wasted face bore a sickening grin, and it glared with its addict’s eyes as if it were alive. Horrified, Alan pushed the curtain back into place and stumbled away. 

He did not continue to look for a window, but scrabbled together his supplies, and rushed down the stairs. He’d recognized in that demonic face a person too familiar to him for comfort. And all was suddenly worse than Alan could have dreamed. As he ran down stairs and through halls that suddenly seemed crooked and wrong, he only hoped he could avoid Dorian and make as quick an exit as possible. 

Dorian was waiting in the drawing room, and his face was no longer wild. He smiled at Alan, a little manic in his brightness. 

“Stay for a drink?” he asked, as if he hadn’t just had Alan dissolve a suicide’s body, as if his hands didn’t still reek of corpse. 

“My god, Dorian,” Alan whispered. “I cannot stay.” 

Dorian walked over to him, languid and graceful as always. 

“But you must! You are a friend, are you not? I could never be cruel to a friend.” 

He smiled feverishly, and clasped Alan’s hands in his, as he used to, when he showed Alan his collections of paintings, or pulled him into some clammy alley to steal a few furtive moments. And Alan had loved that about him, loved his flagrant disregard for all conformity. But now, Alan tried to pull away, even as Dorian held him fast. His eyes, Alan noticed, had a feverish light. And he could not pull himself away from that, not now, not even though he wanted to banish Dorian Gray from his life forever. 

“I cannot go and I cannot stay,” he said to Dorian, and a lump of something, maybe hate, stopped up his throat where the words had been. 

Dorian reached up to touch his cheek, to stroke it gently with his cool hand, and Alan was at once soothed and frightened. His heart beat with all the wildness of a bat which has been trapped in the chimney, and upon some disturbance, flies out, alarmed, into the sitting room. 

“I know, my dear,” Dorian said softly. “It has been terrible for you, and I ought to show you my thanks properly. You’ve done me a great favor. So great, in fact, that I shan’t even ask you to play for me this evening. You’ve done enough even without your violin.” 

Dorian must have been reckless in his relief, or at least confident in the discretion of his servants, because Alan’s lips were already on Dorian’s and he’d lost his waistcoat by the time they reached Dorian’s bedroom. Alan found himself welcoming it all, losing himself in sensation (how long had it been since he’d touched another person’s skin? Not since he’d left Dorian, he supposed). For the blessed hours of the night, he allowed himself to be happy again, to touch and be touched. Dorian’s red lips and gold hair and devilish eyes were all that he could think of until he fell asleep. 

He woke sometime later, haunted by a foggy dream of eyes. The portrait fluttered through his mind, and Alan sat up with a start. Dorian’s familiar room was drenched in cold, icey moonlight, adulterated by the sullen gleam of a streetlamp, and Alan grew furious with himself and with his pleasure. Why had he stayed? Why hadn’t he confronted Dorian about the grotesque in his attic? His family and his duties all seemed very far away now. 

Frantically, Alan pulled himself from bed, not even caring if he woke Dorian, who lay asleep like Cupid in the myth, and began, in the darkness, to search for his clothes. He pulled them on haphazardly as he found them, and in his haste, tripped over a footstool. To Alan, the noise was his own version of Psyche’s oil. Dorian sat up, beautiful and sleepy. He could not have looked less like the horrible portrait in the attic, for in this early hour, he was bathed in the radiant innocence of autumn moonlight. 

“Alan? Whatever are you doing?” 

As Dorian spoke, he changed In the spattered moonbeams, his eyes glowed with the same feverish brightness as the eyes of the portrait, and Alan’s blood turned cold. 

“I cannot stay!” he cried. “I hope to God we never cross paths again!” 

Though Dorian called out behind him, Alan did not listen. He ran through darkened hallways, and out the door into the frosty night, blind to his surroundings, the streetlamps a dim blur as he sprinted across slick pavements. But even when he found himself at his own door, even when he had bolted himself inside and sank to the chill and dirty floors, he still felt the eyes on him. 

***

In early December, a very different Alan Campbell rose in the darkness and dressed in his best clothes. They fit him loosely, for he’d grown gaunt, and he had trouble with his buttons, because he’d gnawed his nails down to bloody nubs in the days and weeks following the destruction of the corpse. 

Alan tidied his room, placed a note for his landlady and a letter for his mother and father on the table, and gave one last dusting to his violin case. He tried not to think of his laboratory, locked up for the last time after a particular chemical’s odor had caused him to swoon, remembering eyes. 

He locked the door as he went out into the foggy, predawn blackness of the early morning. Walking with purpose, Alan acknowledged no one as he approached the river, the high bridge before him black in the fog. The creaks and groans of a waking city did not dissuade him from his task, and he walked to the top of the bridge, his footfalls heavy. When he came to the center, he looked out over the fog-ghosts of London, onto the gray-brown Thames, and he thought of summer. He remembered a night at an opera, listening to music, and smiling at a golden-haired young man who smiled shyly back. 

But all too soon, it was winter in Alan’s mind as he remembered the eyes of Dorian Gray. And in the gloom, he saw different, mocking, luminescent eyes, a clawed hand, an emaciated ribcage in a stained shirt. Alan bit at what was left of his nails, looking wildly about him, half-thinking he would call for help until he saw the shadow in the gloom, and thought he smelled a faint whiff of chemicals upon the wind. 

_Perhaps, _Alan thought, _I ought to return again to the laboratory. It would be fitting. For even in the river, the eyes will find me. _

He turned away from the bridge, and back into the warren of London’s streets. The fog promised to be thick that day, but even in its choking darkness, he could see the mocking half smile of the portrait in Dorian Gray’s attic. 

“It shall follow me to my death,” Alan said aloud. 

Nearly half an hour later, he was reaching for his pistol as soon as he entered the laboratory. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! There's no indication in the novel that Alan ever actually saw Dorian's portrait, but considering you requested sanity slippage, I just couldn't resist that slight point of divergence. Things turn out more or less the same, but Alan now knows one more secret about Dorian Gray.  
Title is from Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Doleurs)".


End file.
